Story of LJ, Final Chapter: Larry Johnson's post-NFL quest for peace

It seems like football has always been a roller coaster for Larry Johnson.

All that time he spent at Penn State waiting, then extreme success for a year, only to be drafted and made to wait again. Then even greater success: all-pro selections, pro bowls, record-setting seasons behind hall of fame linemen… and then the dysfunction.

The warning signs were there from the beginning: those early run-ins with then-Chiefs coach Dick Vermeil, being made a third-string back as a first-round pick, all combined with the things going on in Johnson’s personal life at the time. It crescendoed into one of the biggest falling outs in Kansas City sports history.

Throughout it all though, Johnson said he was sad to go.

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“I was sad because I was leaving that record behind that I was 75 yards from getting,” Johnson said. “They made it a point that they didn’t want me to touch Priest’s (Holmes) all-time yardage record. So they pulled me out of the San Diego game when I made that comment to that media guy about Todd Haley being just a golf pro and not a football coach. It kind of sealed my fate.

“They didn’t want someone like me who had all the personal off-field issues that I had to break Priest’s record. Priest was so revered in that whole city … I mean they named a street after him for a day or two and all that.

“So when I was released it was sad because it wasn’t like I could (sign) anywhere because I was at a point in my career where I was almost 30, and already had a lot of off-field baggage issues, so it didn’t help my chance of getting on a team.”

Though he found work in Cincinnati after the Chiefs released him, Johnson would never again be a bell-cow back.

His transition to the bench proved to be a struggle because he never really had a role in any of the offenses he played in outside of Kansas City.

“I left at a time that they didn’t require big running backs like me and especially with me being older and with me it was always an image thing,” Johnson said. “It was me knowing I was better than guys but I can’t get the same opportunity as them because in their offenses I was just an add-on.

“I wasn’t a guy that they wanted or needed. I was more like a reserve player or a sixth man rather than guys they needed to help the offense.

“It really made my confidence fall, and it pretty much felt like the writing was on the wall about who they wanted in the offense and where they were moving offensively, so it just wasn’t my time to be in the league anymore.”

Johnson was released by the Miami Dolphins after a Week 2 loss in 2011, and never caught on with another team.

All the success he had worked for seemed to vanish as quickly as it came, and it led Johnson into a deep depression.

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“When I walked away from it I went into a really depressed state of mind. I hit rock bottom,” Johnson said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I felt like I wanted to play but I didn’t know how to make it happen. I couldn’t rest with just being retired. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after football.”

For Johnson, the road through early retirement wasn’t always well-paved. Without the sport that he had played for seemingly his whole life, Johnson felt lost.

“They always say you have to go back to school but telling someone whose love and pride is to play football since (they were) nine,” Johnson said, “It’s like being in a marriage and divorcing someone you really really love or like losing a loved one. To me that’s how it felt.

“It felt like I had lost somebody in my life, like I was going through a divorce and I had to pick the pieces up of what I wanted to do after that because the only thing I knew I loved was football. I didn’t want to do anything else.

“So I went like five or six years, I continued to have personal and emotional problems and I would take my anger out on everybody. I was going out all the time, I was drinking way too much, I was neglecting my responsibilities as a parent.

“It was just a hard time letting go of what football meant to me. It took a lot of therapy and help for myself to really understand where I was in my life and to try and rebuild my confidence, build my emotional value to move on and do things that mean something.”

But his story isn’t just about rock bottom. The man who gave these quotes, the man who told this story, isn’t the same Larry Johnson that Chiefs fans watched on TV a decade ago.

When all the fallout happened in 2011 and the Chiefs were on the verge of their worst collapse in decades, it was so easy to point a finger at the oft-maligned Larry Johnson. He was an easy target. Some fans despised him.

It’s not until years later that fans get to see who he really is: a man who fought his demons and came out a better man for it.

Johnson talked about those years after football, and described the whole time as part of a healing process.

“I got over not being able to play football anymore,” Johnson said. “I was able to watch games and enjoy games (again). My period of grief and mourning was over. (I needed) to find something that I can have a purpose in doing and it took me some time, and having a better relationship with my daughter and taking her to school and having those things that I had to change.

“Putting myself last and putting her first and just being able to enjoy life again and being around people who weren’t as caustic to me. (Being around people that) didn’t just want to see me fail or see me drunk or see me in clubs all the time and taking advantage and laughing at me as if I was a joke or a washed up.

“And that’s how I got over a lot of it. I was able to have a more productive outlook on life and now I was being more retrospective. Looking back at what I had been through I started noticing things that I did. I can understand how people would look at me differently.

“That’s what I really wanted to apologize for and come out and really talk about. I really wasn’t ready to talk about those experiences because I had so much animosity towards everyone for not understanding. But how can they understand that if they don’t hear my story and hear where I’m coming from?”

It turns out he’s working in juvenile detention centers, high schools, and after school programs with Motivational Edge, a performance art based program that targets places where arts and music are being taken out of schools.

“For a lot of kids we’re doing preventative mental illness work,” Johnson said. “What we want to do is have the kids come to us when we’re in the schools and allow them to be creative and dance. Painting, drawing, poetry, performance art, rapping, singing.

“A lot of these kids are so musically ahead of everybody else that they don’t have an outlet to be creative or make music. So we give them the opportunity to do that and to let them have their fun and let them be themselves around other peers. Not feel like they have to grow up and take tests for the rest of their lives.”

That’s noble work for a guy who found a renewed sense of purpose after he lost the love of his life.

The struggle is what makes him both who he was as a ball player, but also how he is as a man. Johnson always seemed to use his time on the gridiron to silence the doubters.

He ran angry because he was angry.

It was something he described as an “art of war” type mentality where he was out to hurt the defenses before they hurt him.

“It’s like that Nicholai Machiavelli saying, and I’m paraphrasing this, but if your hurt someone so viscously, if you damage them so bad, you don’t need to fear their revenge.

“I’m going to get you first before you even get your momentum up to try and get me. If I can do that I can damage you so mentally, emotionally and physically in the first half of football that I don’t need to fear you when I get into the third and fourth quarter when the game is on the line because you already know I’m here for the whole game.

“You already know that that rage is going to come and it’s going to make me stronger because I already feel that you’re weaker than me so I’m going to keep coming at you till you’re no longer in my way.”

And Johnson has done the same thing in his life.

He summed it up succinctly, but in a way that was telling given the context of his stints on the bench, personal issues during his career, squabbles with coaches, and the plethora of other things that could’ve gone better for him.

“You were insulting me thinking that you could tackle me by yourself. I ran like that because I had so much to prove.”

Nobody has ever been able to keep Larry Johnson off his feet.

Whether in college at Penn State or in the NFL, Johnson has always been exceptional. Sometimes he just needed to prove it to himself.